Japanese and foreign companies make all sorts of localization attempts for their websites, many of which are flawed and puzzling. I’ve always assumed there was some internally sound reasoning for what and how they decided to localize, and that it must be serving someone or some purpose, even if I personally found it useless.

I’m struggling to imagine the someone or some purpose behind a top-page only English version of Rakuten, “Japan’s biggest online shopping mall”. For anyone comfortable enough with Japanese to use the rest of the site, an English top page is unnecessary, and for anyone without the Japanese skills to use the rest of the site, an English top page does nothing to help them complete a purchase. They didn’t even bother to put the word Rakuten in English anywhere in the site’s masthead.

I’d love to hear the back story on this. Anyone have any details?